What makes certain kinds of writing paraliterature rather than literature? Looking at the list of categories in the prospectus for Para*doxa, I can see two common threads. First, it includes nearly everything I read for pleasure. Second, such forms as science fiction, utopian romance, and mysteries all depend on the reader's applying some form of outside knowledge to the text, without which the text may seem trivial or incomprehensible. The most obvious case is science fiction, which names itself after the body of know- ledge most essential to successful reading. Occult fiction similarly requires familiarity with the language and commonplace assumptions of pseudo-science. Utopian literature requires us to draw comparisons between its imagined societies and actual social institutions past and present. Westerns depend on familiarity, not so much with the realities of the historical American West, but with the myths generated within and about the West.

      A related phenomenon is that each of these paraliterary forms functions as a sort of super text, so that all westerns work together to form one epic tale, and all utopias debate one another in an ongoing Socratic symposium. For this reason, the reading of any one story is enhanced by reading others in the same mode. Only the experienced reader of mysteries fully appreciates the allusions, the narrative tricks, the simultaneous acknowledgment and violation of convention worked by a master of the form. This may be why a regular reader of mysteries or science fiction is willing to read indifferent examples of the chosen form as well as outstanding ones. He is reading the genre, rather than the isolated masterpiece, and the fullest enjoyment of even the masterpiece depends on knowing the genre's full range.

      Futhermore, several paraliterary forms have developed their own critical traditions, in which specialized reading strategies and necessary background knowledge are codified and passed on to would-be readers. Science fiction, in particular, has fostered the growth of a critical industry largely independent of the literary academy. Several of the most acute commentators have also been science fiction writers - James Blish, Damon Knight, Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin. Others are primarily fans. The net effect of their work has been to provide ways to value science fiction in the face of indifference or outright hostility from mainstream critics. When Blish pillories Randall Garrett or praises Theodore Sturgeon, we see not only what constitutes excellence in a science fiction story but also how to read the hack and the master with full awareness of the language game both are engaged in.

      So paraliterature seems to be marked by dependence on an extratextual knowledge or megatext which includes a high degree of intertextuality within a genre and a specialized mode of reading fostered by in-house critics. What, then, is literature?

      It is hard to imagine anything more self-consciously literary than Modernist poetry. The Waste Land is the type case of the difficult, finely-wrought, self-contained verbal artifact. Its worth was long considered self-evident; its meanings inexhaustible. Yet anyone who has taught the poem knows that students must first be introduced to late Romantic poetic conventions, the social upheavals of the nineteen-teens and twenties, the reinterpretation of myth by early psychologists and anthropologists, and the literary intentions and practices of Eliot and his circle. In other words, the modernist poem is no less dependent than is science fiction on an extraliterary megatext, but its megatext consists of knowledge already possessed by most English teachers and literary scholars. Likewise, the degree to which modernist poems refer to and depend upon one another is partially disguised by the fact that most readers encounter them in a literature course. The Waste Land, rightly enough, functions as part of longer texts called The Complete Poems of T.S. Eliot and Modern Poetry. What we don't generally notice is that it would not function nearly so well, or possibly not at all, on its own.

      And of course, Modernist poetry requires a very specialized set of reading strategies, which were invented by people like Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and T.S. Eliot himself. Once those strategies were adopted by other critics and educators, becoming the dominant classroom method for several decades, the texts for which they are best suited naturally found their way in the center of the literary canon.

      So my definition of paraliterature turns out not to be so useful after all, for it redefines most or all of literature as paraliterature. Everything is margin; the center is empty. Actually, I find that formulation perfectly satisfactory, but it does not explain why there is even the illusion of a center, and why certain modes are deliberately excluded by those who wish to foster that illusion.

      Perhaps Clara Reeve answered that question in 1785, in her study of The Progress of Romance. She was trying to figure out why defenders of the realistic novel were similarly marginalizing the Greek, Medieval, and Gothic romances that she loved. "The learned men of our century," she pointed out, "have in general affected a contempt for this kind of writing, and looked upon Romances, as proper furniture only for a lady's Library." Like the women to whom they were consigned, romances were turned into the excluded Other in order that the realistic novel might become the center, the norm, the self.

      Reeve pointed out that "there is frequently a striking resemblance between works of high and low estimation, which prejudice only, hinders us from discerning," and offered as explanation the emotional ties between literary forms and their producers and consumers. As Reeve notes, it does no good to point out that the favored form and the excluded one may have excellences in common, for such a similarity, "when seen, we do not care to acknowledge: for the defects of a favourite Author, are like those of a favourite friend; or perhaps still more like our own." By defending our chosen genres we attempt to defend and define ourselves, and part of definition is exclusion.

      Paraliterature is thus whatever needs to be denied in order to assert the importance of a form and the centrality of its associated community. The genres that embody the experience, values, and knowledge of that group must be made to seem natural and universal, and genres that challenge or ignore the group's identity must accordingly be defined as abnormal, eccentric, and nonliterary.

      For this reason alone, it is worth gathering together the various paraliterary forms in order to see what they say about our culture. The audiences they appeal to, such as children and women; the settings they invoke, such as the West or outer space; the storytelling formulas they have developed, such as the voyage of adventure or the solving of a mystery: these are the repressed elements of the cultural self. This knowledge is what literature cannot acknowledge.

      Many of the questions that must of necessity be central to any consideration of paraliterature I have been writing about and struggling over for fifteen-going-on-twenty years. In 1985, these struggles won me the Pilgrim Award from the SFRA. Much of what I wrote was polemical - and called for a three-part program.

      The first part was fundamentally a change of attitude by those who were seriously interested in paraliterary work. That change could be fundamentally expressed: stop worrying about legitimating your object (which means stop worrying about origins, art vs. craft, and high-art, low-art), and start critiquing that object.

      The remaining two parts were a twin-pronged research program: the first prong was an insistence on a rigorously materialist exploration of the conditions of paraliterary production, dissemination, and consumption. The second prong - and third (and most important!) part - was a revision in the nature of the object of study: all genres, literary or paraliterary, were seen as ways of reading. Thus, the import to the materialist research was in the way the conditions of production, dissemination, and reception affected the way of reading that was the particular paraliterary genre under study - science fiction, comic books, pornography, etc.

      In terms of promulgating this program... For the first five years, I banged tables and shouted. For the next five years, I argued coolly and disinterestedly. For the last ten years, I've just been standing around, now and then reminding people that the wheel need not be reinvented every time one starts in again to look at the paraliterary.

      I would love to see Para*doxa take some hard and fast editorial positions and stick by them, i.e., no articles that got caught in the endless search for legitimating origins. I would love it if there were a total ban on all articles in the form "Paraliterary work X fulfills literary task P [as defined by literary critic Q] even better than acknowledged literary work Y. Therefore, X should clearly be considered literary as well." (Such essays are insistently blind to the whole power structure that is the literary/paraliterary divide.) I would love to see the "Aw shucks, this ain't art; it's just a form of craft" attitude banned in all its sneaky, ugly forms from all articles about paraliterary texts in this journal. But I know I'm not going to see such things - because if you did ban them, you wouldn't have enough to fill up an issue!

      "Literature", like "art", "civilization", "culture", and "society" are slippery terms - and their slipperiness is a necessary aspect of their social function.

      "Literature" means all writing that is produced in the acknowledged literary genres, all writing that aspires to be literature, all writing that can conceivably be used to endorse the dominant ideology, either directly or indirectly - that is, until the idea of "literature" comes under any sort of attack. At that point, it completely revises its meaning, pulls in its borders, and becomes "only the best, the very highest quality work that has been produced in these various genres" - which is, of course, a very different thing.

      It's like a medieval fortress town, where most of the time people live happily both inside and outside the wallsŠ until an attack comes - at which point the gate is sealed. Suddenly, lots of peasants and farmers and the general populace find themselves locked outside, victims to the advancing hordes, while only those inside are safe from the ravages of time, forgetfulness, and general attrition under the attack of time. At that point there is, of course, a lot of shouting around the portals (usually from people both inside and out), about how Farmer Jones or Mistress Pickle really ought to be let in - after all, think of all the good they did for the Lord and Lady last Rumptickle Eve. (But Raymond Williams discussed all this at length and its reasons in Keywords...)

      You will find - if you haven't already found - a tendency for people who claim to be writing about paraliterature - i.e., about life among the outlaw hordes in the badlands - to let their attention be easily diverted into defending precisely the secondary and tertiary canonical works shut out when the hordes approach the castle and the gate is dropped, i.e., the farmers who live just a bit beyond the wall. (When Kenneth Branagh's film "Mary Shelly's Frankenstein" opens [ed note: Nov 11, 1994], be prepared for the deluge of essays on "Frankenstein as Paraliterature". Oh, Brian Aldiss, what hath thou wrought!

      Another idiocy I'd like to see just banned from print: the easy and uncritical assertion that Frankenstein is somehow the "origin" of science fiction.) But the fact is, most people don't want to write about paraliterature. They want to write about secondary and tertiary canonical literature - which is something else entirely.

      And the rare critic that does want to write about the paraliterary is usually so critically unsophisticated, he or she can do nothing but make the same noises they have heard literary critics making about their own much beleaguered object. And that is almost as bad. A warrior in the wilderness and a farmer plowing just beyond the walls are not the same thing - and cannot be critiqued as if they were, even if there's lots of commerce between them; which there often is in more peaceful times. Oh well. You have my sympathy and good wishes for a long hard uphill fight.

      The term "paraliterature", however it is understood, always struggles for definition and recognition in the overwhelming shadow of the privileged concept of "literature". To juxtapose the two terms is immediately to recall arguments from an earlier time identifying and challenging the points of difference between such unbalanced antitheses as "art" and Kitsch", "classic" and "pop", "film" and "entertainment". But many of the distinctions that disturbed us in the recent past seem hardly to interest us now. Under the powerful analytical lights of deconstruction and of feminist and ideological critique, literature's claim to truth, which seemed to distinguish it from paraliterature for even some major Marxist theorists, now appears presumptuous. Though there may be generic and stylistic distinctions to be observed between high and low literature, there is nothing essential to these distinctions; social and economic forces determine what will be called "literature", and under different conditions a very different set of distinctions would have developed. To one reader paraliterature is the debased and mechanical parody of high art; to another it is the art that is arbitrarily coded inferior while "legitimate" art is granted a mysterious, though equally arbitrary, excellence; to another it is the source of a lively, spontaneous energy, free from the deadly formalities of high art. The important thing for us now is to understand the social economies that generate these various readings, and then to understand how each individual work speaks rhetorically within the space it has been allotted. My book, Rationalizing Genius, is an attempt to explicate how one area of paraliterature (the SF short story) speaks to a specific class and ideology. I tried to do this without either boosting or condemning the works being interpreted, a difficult trick because judgment is everywhere, not just in the explicit statements.

      At the core of culture is a profound and redundant system of misrecognition whereby we all rationalize our behavior and situation in a social scheme we did not choose. The key thinker for our present understanding of this system is Pierre Bourdieu, whose works, Distinction in particular, are important for their analysis of the essentialist fallacies by which culture enforces itself and reproduces the social-economic structure. Criticism itself is deeply implicated in this process, and critics need to be aware how their own practical interests shape what they claim is academically disinterested analysis. Though habitus (Bourdieu's term for that powerful and inescapable background that any individual brings to the new situations of life) may be destiny, it is also something to be challenged and analyzed. And while the critical revolution of the last decades has questioned some artificial distinctions, it has also clouded the situation by adding a new layer of significance to be interpreted: the stylishness and power of criticism itself. As Bourdieu says, "there is no way out of the game of culture," and we must be aware that the analysis of any part of the cultural map is itself a ploy in the cultural game. An academic journal devoted to paraliterature will inevitably intrude on the field it studies; someone will derive cultural, perhaps even economic profit from the fluctuations in the cultural market that results.

      One fix on the opposition or dynamic literature/paraliterature may be gained by attempting to correlate it with two related oppositions or dynamics: canonic literature/non-canonic literature, and good writing/bad writing. In terms of the number of works covered, the category "non-canonic literature" would be larger than the category "paraliterature", which - if fiction alone is taken into account, as perhaps it should be - would in turn be larger than the category "bad writing". Thus positioned, paraliterature is a complex, shifting middle ground term which covers a proportion of non-canonic writing, a proportion of good writing and presumably the totality of bad writing as it applies to fiction. That middle ground is constantly being amended because of the traffic which takes place in both directions (primarily for ideological reasons) with both of the related oppositions or dynamics. For example, over the past twenty years or so, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has been maneuvered into the slowly reconstructed pantheon of canonic literature.

      There appears to be a consensus that all the works constituting the overtly formulaic genres - the detective story, fantasy, the western, etc. - belong under the paraliterature umbrella. Nevertheless, there are a select number of such genre works - Joseph Conrad's spy thriller, The Secret Agent, comes to mind - which do appear to be part of the canon. Why? How may an overtly formulaic genre be transcended? I hope that some of the articles that Para*doxa publishes will move towards a satisfactory explanation for this phenomena. Rather more than just "good writing" would seem to be involved. There are plenty of well-written formulaic works of paraliterature. In addition to "good writing" there has to be some optimum relation between the formulaic and the non-formulaic elements in any genre text which attains canonic status.

      Finally, I would like to see contributors to Para*doxa consider the contested categories (are there any non-contested categories?) of fiction and non-fiction in relation to paraliterature. The canon, as presently constituted, includes works of both fiction and non-fiction; Darwin's Origin of Species would be an example of canonic "non-fiction". (Perhaps my qualifying quotation marks here are essential to that work's canonization?) Does the category "paraliterature" cover, as is usually assumed, only works of fiction, or can one point, as would seem logical, to examples of paraliterary non-fiction? Currently however, it would seem that non-fiction can be located under canonic literature (and under good writing/bad writing) but not under non-canonic literature and not under paraliterature. I'm looking forward to the first issue of Para*doxa. Best wishes for its success.

      I wish I were comfortable with the definition of our subject as "paraliterature". The division of fiction into a category "literature" and a category "non-" or "sub-" or "para-" reinforces what I want us to question: the notion of fiction as a central or dominant form (realism) surrounded by marginal forms (everything else). "Para-" is not in itself a judgmental term, but it tacitly gives central reality to the unqualified word. To let realistic fiction alone retain the designation "literature", while every other form of contemporary fiction must be qualified as marginal, inferior, or other, is to hide an absolute judgment under a seemingly impartial terminology.

      I'd like to see a reformulation of vocabulary which re-includes the bulk of fiction (historically and currently) in the term "literature". In this case realism is to be defined and referred to not as literature but as a genre within literature, alongside and on a par with other modes or genres. There is then no need for such a locution as "paraliteraure", unless perhaps it refers to criticism.

      Within this framework of parity, I'd like to see a serious attempt at redescribing literary modes or strategies such as "fantasy", "science fiction", "realism", "magical realism", "historical fiction", "romance", etc. The effective differences between, say, realism and science fiction need to be addressed in accurate critical terms, in order to develop the critical skills and perceptions appropriate to each. The incompetence of many academic critics and teachers to read and criticize any kind of fiction but realism (and a narrowly defined realism at that) is no longer acceptable.

      To a mind trained only in the canonical restriction of quality to a single kind of fiction, the active mixing and merging of so-called genres that is going on right now, the re-invention of fiction, is incomprehensible. This rich confusion will only get richer if and as the computer becomes a genuine literary medium along with the book, re-embodying and further complicating the ways in which we tell stories. I hope Para*doxa will be a useful skein to follow into this labyrinth; I hope we will dance in all directions in this garden of forking paths.

      The concept of paraliterature, currently used by European critics, covers a wide range of quite different literary genres - science fiction, horror, fantasy, detection and mystery novels, etc. Their common point is that they are disregarded by academic authorities who refuse to include them in the field of "true" literary creation - hence the term "para". In fact, the difference between mainstream literature and paraliterature is far from clear-cut. For instance, if we look at the new edition of The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English by Ian Ousby (1993), we see that some writers are deliberately omitted - probably because they are deemed to be of lesser importance - whereas others are included, even if their work belongs to what is generally considered paraliterature. In the field of horror and fantasy, for instance, such notable writers as Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany or, more recently, Stephen King and Anne Rice, do not seem to exist, whereas the names of Bram Stoker and Arthur Machen are mentioned. These examples show that the criteria that is used to establish a hierarchy between paraliterature writers are not clearly defined. If fame is the sole criterion we can easily understand why Bram Stoker should overshadow Algernon Blackwood, but we do not see why Stephen King, a writer whose novels are translated throughout the world, has been omitted. If, notwithstanding fame, it is literary quality which prevails, Cambridge scholars are perfectly entitled to place low value on The Shining if they choose to, but we do not understand why they should ignore such a fine writer as Algernon Blackwood whose prose is very often far more subtle than Stoker's.

      This would indicate that any attempt to establish a hierarchy among literary genres or among writers stems rather from personal prejudices than from a true scientific approach. It does not constitute a proper academic method of literary assessment. I think, therefore, that it would be a great mistake to confine what is usually termed paraliterature to a cultural ghetto. Poe was ignored in his lifetime, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland was long considered a book for children only, and we might find many other examples of this kind. My own position would be to refuse to accept the distinction between mainstream literature and para-literature. I accepted the invitation to join the Board of Editors of Para*doxa because I was seduced by the founders' ambition to show that literary genres generally accepted as belonging to the so-called paraliterature are worth being discussed and analyzed in scholarly articles.

      In 1973, when I started to prepare my doctoral dissertation on the vampire motif in English and American literatures, I was not taken seriously by some of my colleagues who thought that such a subject was not academic. Since then, fortunately, things have changed in France, which is a conservative country as far as academic standards are concerned. This year, for instance, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is on the program of the old and reputed agrégation (a nation-wide competitive examination for recruiting teachers), which would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. I think there is still much work to be done and that many prejudices still exist. It will be the task of Para*doxa to show that this immense range of literature, hitherto neglected, is worth studying.

      Para*doxa is an ambitious and important venture precisely because the area it intends to cover and the issues it will address are broad and, at this point, are only beginning to be defined. Its concerns are directly related to two major issues in current literary theory, those of genre definitions and of canon formation. Paraliterature may also be studied as an illustration of other aspects of literary study, as we see when someone like Umberto Eco moves from a "literary" text such as a work by James Joyce, to a "paraliterary" one such as an Ian Fleming spy novel or Superman comics. Because popular texts are often simpler and more direct than "literary" ones, they are also interesting to study as indicators of cultural values.

      One area that particularly interests me is the relationship between "literary" and "paraliterary" texts. For example, is paraliterature especially resistant to the breakdown of divisions between genres? Another issue that crosses the boundary between literature and paraliterature is the function of references to popular works in a very "literary" novel and of references to well-known literary works in popular fiction, as when a character in Philip K. Dick's science fiction novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said recognizes the source of a quotation from Finnegans Wake. Para*doxa is in an ideal position to encourage significant scholarly research into paraliterature without regard for critical approach or methodology. The function of a journal like this should be, precisely, to remain open to inquiries into any topic within its domain.

      As one who has written both popular and literary fiction for most of his career, I'm particularly interested in what Para*doxa proposes to do. My efforts at New Worlds were concerned with bringing levels of literary ambition back to popular fiction. I believe we were part of a movement which reintroduced visionary and transcendental elements into the mainstream. What I'm wary of is the kind of academic dissection which seems to me to work against my own continuing aspirations.

      I'm suspicious of academics with an enthusiasm for popular art who look for "respectable" - i.e., orthodox - arguments to support their enthusiasm in a climate of snobbery and careerism where other academics have control of the rhetoric. For this reason, as much as any, I still tend to prefer the criticism of the late 19th century, when many definitions didn't exist and weren't thought to be necessary. I greatly enjoy Sir Walter Raleigh, who founded the Oxford English School in the late 19th century and who wrote a number of fine books on Milton, Stevenson, Shakespeare and others, as well as books such as Style, The English Novel and Romance, (and who became extremely unfashionable in the 20s and 30s as his broad-based humanistic attitudes were replaced by more narrow political attitudes). Raleigh was a critic like Sir Arthur Quiller Couch (so denigrated by Leavis): an intellectual still in touch with the broad reading tastes of the public. He continues to have considerable relevance (I quote him in my book Wizardry and Wild Romance and intend to reprint his great essay on Stevenson at the first opportunity!). Raleigh did not see literature as something linear, marching in one direction, each book a kind of building block upon another. He saw literature in terms of individual talent and taste. This attitude allows far more flexibility when comparing, for instance, Tristram Shandy to Thomas Pynchon's V or Thomas Love Peacock to, say, Howard Waldrop - yet avoiding the kind of pigeonholing that made all sui generis writers "surrealists" or "absurdists" and getting into that odd little trap.

      Leavis, whom I greatly admire for his critical insights, helped politicize the study of English literature and encouraged the empire-building careerism which still informs it. The impulse to politicize - and therefore simplify and codify - the arts has doubtless developed since the growth of academic careerism. It hasn't done much for the arts or, indeed, for criticism. I hope that Para*doxa will go some way to restoring the liberal values exemplified by Raleigh into academic life.

      It might be argued that the success of a particular piece of fiction has, for the most part, depended upon its content rather than its style or plot. I believe, for instance, that George Eliot's success, together with any success Hardy had, was based on the rural settings of the earlier novels. Trollope's respectability swings with the social pendulum. I believe that Cormac McCarthy, good as he is, succeeds because so many of his central characters are adolescent boys and his methods conventional. Any popular success that Philip K. Dick might have, in comparison, say with Alfred Bester, Charles Harness or other equally ambitious contemporaries, comes from the familiar elements and cadences in his work. The phallocentricity of William Burroughs perhaps explains his popularity over more thoughtful American experimental novelists, like Harry Matthews. It is only occasionally, frequently through a particular use of (drunken?) lyricism (Hemingway, Chandler), that very "masculine" books have the widest appeal. Conrad, for instance, is still primarily read by men, just as Austen is primarily read by women. It would be interesting to define what gives a good book (Dickens, say) its universality or why (or if) Gone With the Wind and Rebecca are "women's books" while Tess of the D'Ubervilles is not. Some of the reasons are obvious, but to me some aren't so obvious. George Meredith's The Amazing Marriage is also about the unjust condition of women and is in many ways a far subtler book than Hardy's, or even Eliot's, yet has not had the same academic recognition - in spite of or because of Meredith's large female following.

      It's curious to see how, in many ways, the dominant writers in Britain today are largely imaginative, visionary. Many of them are still marginalized by a minority in a way that Anita Brookner, for instance, is not. I would draw your attention to Peter Ackroyd's fine essay, London Luminaries and Cockney Visionaries, given as one of the "London Lecture" television programs last year, which describes how the 'vulgar' writers and other artists of their day are almost always the lasting ones. He cites Gilray, Blake, Dickens and others as people who were considered unrespectable in polite society. This suggests, of course, that not a lot has changed. It's certainly true that Thackeray advised Dickens it would be a bad career move to publish in monthly parts - then when Dickens's success was so astonishing we find Thackeray deciding that maybe he, too, will publish in vulgar monthly parts.... George Eliot complained of having to do 'the middle volume' which she had to produce because the library market demanded three volumes minimum! With the arrival of the single volume modern novel exemplified by the likes of Conrad, Wells, James and Hardy from the 1890s on, certain commonly accepted commercial realities began to disappear. The rise of the six shilling novel seems to mirror the rise of an academic literary establishment. Prior to that it does not seem to me to have been quite so dominant.

      We appear to have lost the tradition of popular intellectualism which still exists in France. What I mean when I say "popular intellectualism" was exemplified between the wars by the likes of H.G. Wells and H.L. Mencken, Philip Wylie and Aldous Huxley, writers with a pretty broad public and not afraid to raise intellectual ideas or to discuss them on the assumption that they were addressing a wide audience. In France, it seems to me, this assumption prevailed rather more, with the likes of Simone de Beauvoir or even Robbe Grillet. Writers like Grasse in Germany, or Thomas Mann, also seemed to address an ordinary, literate public. In English there seem to be very few such figures now - I don't mean public people like Mailer, who seems to reduce his aspirations in order to address the "mass audience", but people who will assume that their audience has the ability to follow a decent intellectual argument. I find, for instance, that when I'm in France I have very little difficulty in raising fairly lofty ideas in newspaper interviews, whereas in England I am usually reduced to anecdote. I understand that I'm speaking from a subjective viewpoint, of course, but would be interested to know what others think. I wonder if it has to do with the likes of Wells having large popular audiences to whom they habitually appealed, rather than having to make their appeal to an existing literary, academic or even journalistic establishment. It certainly feels different to me. With their own large constituencies, such people did not have to adapt their arguments. They pretty much took control of the rhetoric, as Dickens or Zola did, and set their own agendas.

      As a writer with a large popular audience and all kinds of literary respectability, I don't feel marginalized in any serious way but I also know that I'm extraordinarily lucky to have the kind of power which has enabled me to hold this position. Other writers, especially in contemporary America, don't enjoy that luxury and find themselves adopting the rhetoric of the dominant cultural schools in order to explain themselves. They shouldn't have to. What I hope Para*doxa will do is develop its own rhetoric and arguments, not apply the methods of current Eng Lit criticism (itself in a sorry state by and large) to popular culture. I think we all understand that Brian Aldiss's Greybeard is an altogether better book on every level than P.D. James's Children of Men or that Ballard's concise fables are superior to, say, Martin Amis's Time's Arrow. I also happen to believe that The Ox Bow Incident is far less of a genre novel than, say, Blood Meridian (I admire its prose and vision) and that Margery Allingham's Tiger in the Smoke is a far more sophisticated moral allegory than anything by Paul Auster.

      Much of what I tried to do in New Worlds, and what the likes of Peter Ackroyd, Ian Sinclair and others try to do today, was to bring such good writers back into the mainstream. I have a huge enthusiasm for George Meredith - a very literary writer and one considered "difficult" by academics - whose very best late novels have been out of print for generations. All part of the process which increases the authority of certain writers in direct relationship to the numbers of courses taught, while marginalizing those about whom less has been taught and written. Much as I admire V. Woolf, those who used her and her circle to further their own careers did modern fiction nothing but disservice. Today there's no question that elements of popular as well as visionary fiction have reentered the mainstream.

      Some popular arts are anonymous - or almost so - and I believe that in the end we have to discuss individual practitioners first and their chosen genre or craft second. I've said elsewhere [Wizardry and Wild Romance] that modern fantasy fiction reminds me of those almost identical cheap hand-painted trinkets sold everywhere in the world, especially in the third world. Most of it - from Egyptian papyrus painting to Russian box painting - is at best faithful to its antecedents. But every so often you come across work of great individual genius, using the familiar forms yet somehow transcending them. The same with Turkish carpets or Kenyan carvings. In those cases it's probably useful to discuss genre first before describing what is different about the best. Otherwise I believe that Thomas M. Disch, say, or Philip K. Dick require no introduction, no labels, no explanation.

      Why bother with trivial genres, adventure, mystery and romance? Isn't all popular fiction essentially banal and ephemeral stuff which will not endure? It may pass an hour in the here and now, but it will be forgotten. Such merely crowd-pleasing matter is not worthy of further discussion. So some might say, but I believe differently. If popular music and popular cinema - not to mention sport - deserve comment and discussion, then so does popular fiction. It is read by many millions of people; it impinges on the lives of millions of others via radio, cinema, comic-strip and television adaptations; it is a major fact of modern life, and has been for a very long time. It should be self-evident that popular fiction merits a journal such as Para*doxa to comment on it. Why does popular fiction matter?

      (1) Much of it is not in fact "forgotten" tomorrow. It lives on and on in the individual and social memory. However loftily intellectual - or grittily matter-of-fact - we may believe we have become in adulthood, popular fiction is likely to have touched our lives when we were young, and we do not forget it. The names of popular fictional characters such as Robinson Crusoe, Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Superman and James Bond have entered the language and are likely to be remembered for as long as our era in history is remembered.

      (2) Today's bestsellers and genre works may, just possibly, become tomorrow's literary classics. Of course, this will not be true in all cases - but then nor is it true for all would-be "serious novels". In their day, Defoe, Richardson, Scott and Dickens were all great crowd-pleasers; now their works are taught in university literature courses. P.G. Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler and who knows how many other 20th-century popular tale-tellers bid fair to join them among the Imperishable Classics. Only time will tell.

      (3) Popular fiction may have educational value. The Guardian columnist Edward Pearce made the point rather well in a piece he published in that newspaper on May 1, 1991. Commenting on Prince Charles's recent worries about declining educational standards, Pearce recalls how his own early interest in history was awoken by the novels of "a baddish author, Harrison Ainsworth", and goes on to say "all sorts of books will turn keys". He concludes by commending two current authors whose historical novels he has particularly enjoyed: Patrick O'Brian and Cecilia Holland. "There are worse things than good historical novels, worse things than Shakespeare, and the odds are that an intelligent youngster reading one will turn to the other."

      (4) Pop literature has sociological interest, in that it tells us much about the aspirations and prejudices, the dreams and nightmares, of a given era. This is the tack which is steered by many of those academics who do bother to study popular fiction. As Tony Bennett, editor of Routledge's series of books on the subject, has said: "Popular fictions saturate the rhythms of everyday life. In doing so, they help to define our sense of ourselves, shaping our desires, fantasies, imagined pasts and projected futures. An understanding of such fictions... is thus central to an understanding of ourselves."

      (5) Sheer pleasure. In the last analysis, many of us continue to enjoy popular fiction (or some types of it, at any rate) even when we are ashamed to admit the fact. Everyone has heard of the legendary bishops and Oxford dons who read detective stories; and, for that matter, of the high-powered professional career-women who relax with Mills & Boon and Harlequin romances. Anyone who reads fiction at all is likely to read popular fiction at least some of the time. A taste for adventure, mystery and romance is not confined to one social class, to one age-group, or to one height of the brow. We all read it - don't we?

      It seems to me that the problem with the term "paraliterature" is much the same as with "science fiction". Once heatedly discussed, with definitions rampant, "sf" now seems to be granted as a working term without too much concern for its precise meaning, encompassing a broad spectrum of creations. Much the same may happen with "paraliterature". In the German speaking countries, "paraliterature" has been adopted by some as a more neutral term than previous ones like "Trivialliteratur" which have a derogatory meaning. Others prefer "popular literature" or even "Volksliteratur", i.e., a kind of literature that is, unlike many of the highbrow literary works discussed in the literary pages of quality newspapers, critical magazines and philological departments, actually read by large numbers of readers and which shapes, to some extent, their outlook and their expectations. Especially in the Germanic countries with their traditional distinction between "real literature" and popular fiction, the latter has been widely ignored. Much of it has been lost forever since it wasn't collected in libraries (as though it were beneath their notice) and often not even bibliographed. Unlike the situation in the Anglo-Saxon countries where collectors and fans have preserved and researched even the most obscure books and magazines, in Germany and Austria many publications, although once circulated widely, have simply disappeared. This process was furthered by campaigns to promote "good literature" and confiscate "trash". Around World War I there were several campaigns in schools to exchange "Schundliteratur" for wholesome books - which means in actuality that fairly interesting dime novels were traded for patriotic trash that was by no means better literature, but encouraged for political reasons. An example in point is the once tremendously popular early science fiction series "Der Luftpirat" which has become so rare that most collectors have never seen a copy, some have a few, and there is said to be only one person who has a complete set of the magazine. And no library has any copies. I think that works like "Der Luftpirat" are important for the audience they once commanded, and a valuable indicator of a climate of attitudes and ideas floating around in a society. It would be a mistake to subject paraliterature to a purely literary analysis, which should rather be nearly the last concern. This is where, in my opinion, sf criticism (with which I am most familiar) has run afoul of academic respectability. Scholars apply the tools they have learned to texts that do not measure up to literary standards and treat them nevertheless as if they were serious literary works, telling you a lot but not perhaps the crucial point - that they are not really very good. Literary scholars tend to make the analyzed works appear better than they are, partly because, I think, of an unconscious bias. They would have to explain why they devoted so much effort to studies of sf if, in the end, they concluded that most of it really wasn't very good. A more realistic attitude, more cognizant of the real strengths and weaknesses of popular literature would be to safeguard against such distortions. Whereas sf now gets a disproportionate amount of critical attention, what is now probably the most widely read genre, the romance novel, gets scant attention. This is an imbalance that needs correction.

      From the universe of possible human behaviors, any society or subculture utilizes only a fraction, which undergoes change over time. This rule applies to all cultural elements, from fashions to language to methods for determining truth, and choices by which a society measures its culture exclude other alternatives. In the simplest analysis, then, paraliterature is a catch-all term for forms of popular expression (oral and written) that University-trained people treat like weeds in a garden.

      Paraliterary forms with which I am most familiar - science fiction, utopia, fantasy, myth - often entertain broader visions of the universe and of human behavior than the academy recognizes. All of them have some admixture of "non-literary" materials and frequently cross the lines dividing literary from musical and visual art, not to mention graphic stories (comic books and animation) and electronic media. Myth, fantasy and utopia get some respect as products of the "childhood of the race", but not science fiction, which flourished after the shaping of the canon.

      Like any social institution, the 20th century literary canon is myopic, measuring the past by relevance to its own formation. Romantic and post-Romantic literature are studied largely as predecessors and exemplars of Modernism. Indeed, much past writing would be paraliterary were it produced today. Contemporary theory may have exploded realism as a set of conventions reinforcing a 19th century "common-sense" world view. They continue to underwrite Modernism, however, in its microscopic approach to psychology and its insistence on the primacy of the artwork. Postmodernism continues the legacies of Modernism (often inverted or recycled) and similarly rejects other visions of existence. More a critical dead-end than an aesthetic movement, this academic category may be a last-ditch defense against the barbarians, an attempt to exert some measure of control over the influence and dissemination of paraliterature.

      I have no quarrel with most of the classics of Romantic and Post-Romantic literature, and their places of honor in the academic canon. The canon does honor mental acuity, verbal proficiency, and contribution to civilization. Mass produced by people with minimal literary talent, and relying on easy audience acceptance, most paraliterary writing is in fact inferior verbal art (as is most writing that aspires to canonical status). Any tradition, however, enforces a party line, which tends to denigrate products by category. Gender and ethnic barriers may have cracked, but paraliterary forms are still excluded, and with them, the kinds of lateral thinking and world views they embody.

      The academy rarely takes seriously even well-executed and thoughtful paraliterature. Indeed, canonical recognition may be the kiss of death for paraliterary forms alive in the market, which depend to an extent on not being assigned reading. Once the market abandons a paraliterary form, however, as it probably will, only the academy may be equipped to keep it alive in the future, even as a memory. Studying these alternative traditions now will enable us better to serve that museum function.

      In 1980, when I published The Limits of Infinity: The American Science Fiction Film 1950-1975, science fiction film was cinema studies' equivalent of paraliterature: a marginalized genre seen as somehow beneath the consideration given to the western, film noir, the musical and, eventually, even the horror film. However, shortly after I published Screen Space (an expansion of the book) in 1987, Sf was preeminent among film genres. While I'd like to think my book had something to do with it, I have to settle for being merely prescient - for the move of sf film from margin to center, from paraliterature to canonical text, was a function of both radical changes in film theory and analytic methods and a growing interest in the relation between film and cultural studies. In its early stages, genre study focused on stable generic forms that seemed bound spatially and temporally and offered up a clear iconography. Now, attention to genre is also attention to culture and sf film has been recognized as a significant mapping of the shifting, unstable coordinates of postmodernity.

      Sf film, then, in terms of films studies, is no longer paraliterature - that is, outside the bounds of what counts as an appropriate academic object. We could say it has been "disciplined". However, one could make the same case for the progression of film in general. Intellectuals first marginalized the movies as a low-class amusement, then argued it as a legitimate art form and excluded base and popular productions, and now inclusively embrace everything cinematic from pornography to surveillance film to the Home Shopping Network as cultural objects worthy of study. Having a penchant for writing about things on the margin, I have no quarrel with the dissolution of the canonical by its very expansion - other than that I am no longer able to indulge my romantic pride in being an "outsider". This contemporary situation is not unique to film studies and it provokes me to ask how we can speak of paraliterature if we think of it as that which is uncanonized? The very existence of Para*doxa speaks to the cultural "colonization" and academic "canonization" it would challenge.

      I am, of course, being both totalizing and ironic here to make a point about the relativity of what might count as paraliterature. There are some few kinds of film not yet "disciplined" by film studies because no one knows quite what to do with them (whether methodologically or culturally). Even in its most neo-Marxist moments, film studies couldn't quite bring itself to deal with industrial films or educational films or training and promotional films. Perhaps the repressed aestheticism that initially grounded the discipline explains not only this previous neglect, but also the current neglect of these sorts of films - even under the umbrella of cultural studies. Indeed, if there is a paraliterature in film studies (possibly an oxymoronic conjunction), it would be less films about the occult, the supernatural, the fantastic than it would be films about making Ford trucks, teaching students how to use a condom, training salesmen to give a pitch, and promoting Florida as a safe place for tourists.

      Recognizing the concept of paraliterature as that literature which exists outside the standard literary canon (or which was excluded from the canon as it became the canon) and which includes such seemingly disparate sub-genres as fantasy, mystery, westerns, and children's literature (to name but a few) points indirectly to the problems involved in establishing a critical perspective on that literature.

      The first problem, and the most obvious one, is that the sub-genres of paraliterature have been viewed as separate from one another and from the mainstream by publishers, marketers, readers, and academics alike. The separate sections for science fiction, fantasy, westerns, mysteries, children's literature, and romances are clearly labeled in both chain bookstores and independent bookstores; and that separation reflects both the way in which publishers buy and produce books as well as the way that readers shop for books. In addition, the separation of this genre fiction from sections labeled "classics" or "fiction" suggests that they are different, somehow, and the location of genre fiction sections toward the back (or less-prestigious area) of many bookstores may imply that this fiction is less important than other fiction.

      Academics, who might be expected to know better, have contributed to this problem in two ways. First, they have drawn a line, albeit an indistinct one, between the canon and paraliterature. Defenders of the canonical have ignored or disparaged paraliterature, refusing to consider it the equal of established literatures, while its advocates may also have done it an indirect disservice by teaching genre courses - fantasy, science fiction, children's literature, and the like. Second, those advocates have formed such scholarly organizations as the Children's Literature Association, the Science Fiction Research Association, and the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts which may have further separated genre fiction from the canon and which may also have served to separate the various sub-genres. These separations - created by proponents and those outside the field - have made it difficult to approach paraliterature as a mode or form of fiction and have encouraged critics to ignore the elements - such as a plot which resembles that of a traditional folk tale or clearly-defined issues and representations of good and evil -which can be found among many if not all of the sub-genres.

      The second problem has been articulated most forcefully by science fiction author and critic Samuel R. Delany. In his 1985 Pilgrim Award Acceptance Speech, he argues, "We must read science fiction as science fiction." He goes on to explain that critical perspectives and terminology borrowed from canonical literary studies are perhaps inappropriately applied to science fiction. The nineteenth-century concept of the "well-made novel", for example, may not apply to science fiction; and much classic "Golden Age" science fiction contains an optimism for the future that is quite the opposite of modern realistic fiction's existential despair. Looking for those elements in science fiction may well be a critical wild goose chase the failure of which should reflect badly on the critic rather than, as it often does, on the literature. Delany further argues that science fiction criticism has failed to take adequate note of science fiction's particular history and development - a development which has included, among other things, the enormous impact of fan readers and of editors, especially in the 1940s and 1950s.

      Delany's argument could be applied to all of the sub-genres within paraliterature; in a critical haste to legitimize the study of these literatures, critics have been treating them as if they were canonical literature (and perhaps trying to make them canonical) when they should have been establishing a particular sub-genre's legitimacy on its own terms. That is, fantasy should be examined as fantasy, children's literature as children's literature, and so forth. Moreover, the use of borrowed critical perspectives contains the inherent danger that they might not work - the result of which would be to make the paraliterary work seem inferior to the canonical merely because it is not susceptible to the same kinds of analyses. It is crucial to establish what it is about a fantasy novel or short story, for example, that makes it fantastic; it will then be possible to evaluate it as fantasy. The critics in this field must articulate what it is that makes each sub-genre unique and then what it is that makes paraliterature unique.

      What is needed, and what Para*doxa should provide, is a venue wherein the individual sub-genres may be examined on their own terms and may also be examined as they are parts of a larger whole called paraliterature. What should result is a new understanding of this literature which enables it, or the best representatives of it, to stand on its own as quality literature (regardless of subject matter or intended audience) and which enables criticism in this field to approach the literature from an appropriate perspective rather than in the borrowed robes of a critical perspective designed for different literary genres.

      One day I fell in love with "Invisible Culture". I'm not talking about an abstract notion, just recollecting the day video artist David Blair took me to see/hear the extraordinary gig of a multiethnic (black, white and yellow) rock'n roll band called "Invisible Culture" at the "Knitting Factory" in the East Village. Their music drove me crazy; it was not only racially mixed but dangerously erotic. In a sense, their music acted as a sort of powerful drug; once you take it, you can't live without it. I want to speak not only about the magnetic attraction of a multiethnic band called "Invisible Culture", but also about paraliterature as an invisible culture. The term "paraliterature" is inevitable, since one of its theoretical champions is Samuel Delany, a great male-gay-New Wave science fiction writer belonging to the race Ralph Ellison called "invisible". Disguising himself as K. Leslie Steiner, Delany once remarked: "In spite of some heavy arguing by people both positively and negatively disposed toward his book, Delany has insisted that no matter how high-falutin' it all sounds, his work is not literature but paraliterature, and should by analyzed, however seriously, as such" (SF Eye 5:9). What matters here is not that the discourse of paraliterature has been promoted by a writer of invisible ethnicity and sexuality, but that the trope "invisibility" is applied to the canonical problematics of literature. While deeply influenced by the Anglo-American literary tradition, Delany was so skeptical about the discourse of literature invented and constructed by visible intellectuals, that he had to call his science fiction "paraliterary".

      With this point in mind, I would like to describe what happens to paraliterature from a comparative literary perspective. Of course orthodox approaches to literature have involved considerable research into the multiple relationships between text, author, history, intertextuality, intercultural negotiations, international influences, and so on. And yet, what is at stake now might be called the act of making "relationships" visible. Delany's concept of paraliterature, which had many things in common with the concept of good old metafiction, was further assimilated into cyberpunk writing in the 80s, a genre whose literary status has been re-contextualized by theoreticians such as Bruce Sterling, who declared the rise of "slipstream" literature in 1989 (SF Eye 5), and Larry McCaffery, who provided us with the "avant-pop" perspective in 1991 (Positive 1). Despite the contrast between the former's literary generic theory and the latter's literary marketing strategy, Sterling and McCaffery were both concerned with the concept of 'literary category' being deconstructed or deconstructing itself. They taught us a new way to enjoy literature, and put special emphasis, not on the relationship, but on the synchronicity between what's happening in mainstream literature and what's going on in paraliterature.

      Such a perspective will lead us into a comparative literary rereading. Insofar as "literature" is concerned, Japan is a country of excessive importation, not excessive exportation. Consequently, translation makes foreign cultures very visible in Japan, but Japan's literature remains largely invisible to other nations. Japan does not export many of its own national literary accomplishments. Japanese literature is, thus, radically invisible and therefore highly paraliterary.

      But if you look at what's going on in Japanese post-modern literature, you will be amazed at how the business of translation can be equated with the influence of synchronicity. The more texts you translate, the more capitalistic your nation becomes, the more synchronic the two nations, or the two national literatures become. It is the logic of hyper-capitalism that requires us to throw away our idea of causal relationships and to confront the multinational synchronicity between "literature" and "paraliterature".

      For example, if you compare the American writer Paul Auster's Moon Palace (1989) with the Japanese writer Masahiko Shimada's Higan-Sensei (Master Otherside, 1992), two avant-pop novels skillfully displacing the boundary between literature and paraliterature, you will note their common use of the "Moon Palace" restaurant in New York City as the central setting, as well as the similarity of their plot structures which inter-weave "orphan" narratives with many metafictional devices. Shimada wrote Higan-Sensei without reading Auster, narrating a story of an orphan-seeking father, which contrasts strikingly with a father-seeking orphan in Moon Palace. How can we interpret the contrast as well as the synchronicity? This is one of the invisible topics that only paraliterary criticism can pursue.

      Moreover, if you compare Eurudice's f/32 (1990), (a Greek-American writer), with a Japanese woman writer Rieko Matsuura's Apprenticeship of Thumb-Penis (1993), you will see two typical "cyborg-feminist' novels that radically mock the boundary between patriarchal literature and feminist paraliterture. You will also notice another commonality: male and female genitals are portrayed as independent protagonists. While Eurudice describes a woman's sex as running away from her body, in the Gogolian manner, Matsuura describes a woman's thumb that has metamorphosed into a penis in the Kafkaesque fashion. There is no causal relationship between the two writers. Why was the former obsessed with female genitals, the latter with male genitals? Here is another invisible questions that only paraliterary criticism can answer.

      If you read the American-Canadian writer William Gibson's Virtual Light (1993), you must compare it with Japanese junk artist-writer Genpei Akasegawa's brilliant essay Meta-art "Thompson" (1985), (which was largely re-appropriated by Gibson and incorporated into his description of the disused San Francisco Bay Bridge in the near future). I point this out because many American readers have mistaken Genpei Akasegawa as an imaginary artist. What matters most here is that both of them show us the allegory of junk; Gibson jeopardized the generic difference between serious fiction (literature) and junk fiction (paraliterature), while Akasegawa the categorical distinctions between the original and the simulacra, the natural and the cultural, and the literary and the non-literary. Where does literature coincide with junkart? This is one of the invisible problems that only paraliterary criticism can address.

      Cartesian derived analysis cannot explain the "scientifically unthinkable", the para-normal and the unexplainable. Where industrial societies have separated the Subject from the Object, oral cultures (even though moving towards literacy) tend to retain elements of this ontological integration. The concept of the para-literature of industrial and post-industrial societies offers one route to understanding how popular genres reintegrate Subject/Object in a way not possible in conventional analysis. The resulting idea in anthropology of the 1920s was that of "ethnographic surreality" where the observer becomes part of the organic patterns of rituals and other kinds of ceremonies celebrating the mystical.

      The unseen and scientifically unthinkable has been largely excluded from academic analysis, whether of the historical materialist, positivist, or phenomenological kinds. Religion, the spiritual and the paranormal are nevertheless discourses found in all manner of contemporary expression - Madonna, MTV and pop group names such as The Grateful Dead; horror and occult movies and TV series, novels such as those penned by Stephen King; children's TV programs populated with fantastical and other-worldly superheroes, the haunting presentation of Unsolved Mysteries (TV); comic books, televangelism, astrology columns, the Startrek trekkies and fanzines, and the bizarre and extraordinary reportings of the American supermarket tabloids.

      Evil, the bizarre, the surreal and the supernatural continue to speak to subcultures of the popular imagination. How else to explain the extraordinary successes of films like The Omen, Silence of the Lambs, The Exorcist, Poltergeist, and Conan the Barbarian, the books and TV adaptations of Stephen King, and the tabloid press? Is this evil an expression of our inner other, our dark sides, as Karl Jung might explain it? The appeal by authors to the dark side of humanity remains very strong (Picnic at Hanging Rock, Apocalypse Now, Heart of Darkness being examples). As much as orthodox materialist (Marxist or otherwise) academic analysis has suppressed paranormal experience (and experiences), these other-worldly discourses continue to inhabit the stories we tell ourselves through our media. These are consumed, paradoxically perhaps, by millions of otherwise 'normal' people who might claim no direct religious affiliation or beliefs in higher or supernatural deities or forces. Some groups, such as Buddhist Laotian refugees in Chicago, for example, actually read American monster or 'spirit' films as real portents of personal calamities to come - such as death - during their dream states. Their cosmology also reads the violence on TV news within this victimological frame of reference. The spirit of unnatural death - no matter whether fictional or actual - returns to haunt the entire Laotian community (D. Conquergood, "Is it 'Real': Watching Television with Laotian Refugees," PCDS Directions 1986 2(2), 1-3, 5). What might be fiction for individuals located within Cartesian subjectivities and therefore not a threat outside the suspension of disbelief, is in contrast terrifyingly real for those who make no distinctions between their waking and dreaming selves, between their conscious and unconscious states, and between representations and perceived causal consequences.

      Even ordinary Westerners read ontological significance into media representations - whether or not these contain para-normal references. With the breakdown of grand narratives in the post-modernist era, the consequent receding of conventional religions, and the incompatibility of the mélange of pre-modern, modernist and post-modern beliefs that jostle for legitimacy in the post-modern era, it is the media, especially television, which seem increasingly to be taking on the task of conferring integrative meaning to life.

      Paraliterature also connects with science fiction and new cosmo-ontological states where consciousness and technology surrealistically merge into one, such as in the kind of virtual reality imagined in King's The Lawnmower Man, Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: a Space Odyssey and in Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek. Time and space connect through electronics. The conscious and the unconscious selves mesh with the new virtually-generated electronic cosmos and quantum physics. The external observation of chemical and physical experiments now have the technological and methodological capacity to include the observer as participant in the experiment itself. The new media provide new ways of reconnecting Subject and Object in unpredictable ways. Science has achieved the impossible - it has discovered ethnography and participant observation. This is the new paradigm of an "integral world" (see B. Jones, "Cultural Maintenance and Change", Media Information Australia (1993), 69:23-37).

      If readers confer ontological relevance onto TV and cinema, books and comics, computers, video games, etc., then there must surely be an argument for the study of this para-literature not only in departments of literature and anthropology, but also in departments of religious studies, theology, sociology, media studies, language, physics, biological sciences, and so on. Paraliterature is a form of analysis which recovers from the popular media the cosmic continuum and remakes it intelligible to the Cartesian subjective.

      One benefit that I welcome with the appearance of Para*doxa is the opportunity not only to critique paraliterature but also to write a sort of paracriticism. Further, the mandate for this new journal seems incredibly diverse and immense, taking for its purview all "world literary genres." Writing recently for the journal that I now edit, which has the more narrow focus of science fiction and fantasy, I did a review of a book that illustrates what I think are the genre breaking potentials in this new enterprise of Para*doxa; and though I am not reviewing the same book here I want to talk again about my review because the ideas are so exciting to me. Perhaps such repeats represent, also, what I mean by paracriticism on a small scale.

      Monster births, which is a term that the Enlightenment used to refer to mutations and freaks, such as the monster of Dr. Frankenstein, Dracula, and other gothic characters in literature going back at least to Horace Walpole's gigantic Alfonso in The Castle of Otranto raise questions of gender role, genre potentialities, and ultimately our liberation from nature. Such new births are somehow outside of nature and yet, when we develop science and technology, the newness is part of our natural power. We also know this power as Faustian, and since the Enlightenment it has been science fiction, in my opinion, that has addressed most frequently the implications and images of it although, as this new journal will surely explore, all paraliterature is similarly Faustian.

      The Mummy, first published in 1827 anonymously as a three-decker by the young Jane Webb who went on to become "Mrs. Loudon", the more well-known Victorian writer of popular botany, is a gothic novel with elements of science fiction that are now, in a new edition published by the University of Michigan Press, interestingly identified as speculations about gender role. We find a lot about Webb's novel in E.F. Bleiler, Science Fiction: The Early Years, and in Paul Alkon, Origins of Futuristic Fiction, as they write about these early monster births of fiction that led to science fiction. But now in this first printing in our century (the novel was last published in 1872) Webb's work comes alive again as a speculation about gender and genre, and the reprinting itself is an example of paracriticism. Alan Rauch in his thirty-four page introduction, as well as the puffing of this publication with the help of Ursula Le Guin, accomplishes the job in a way that is itself a sort of monster birth of thinking. I like such daring publication behavior; it is so different from the more mundane, though possibly more complete treatment, that either Bleiler or Alkon give to Webb. Rauch argues that the character of the mummy itself, Cheops brought back to England of 2127, is not just a time traveler but also a gender mutant of sorts and that in the resolution of Webb's gothic story there is a "mothering" going on that anticipates a character as exciting as Le Guin's Estraven or Marge Piercy's non-gendered protagonists. I hope that Bleiler and Alkon will notice this new imprint because even though the basic pun that Rauch builds on (mummy/mommy) is pretty horrid the idea is nicely provocative as he presents it. And I wanted to write about this new edition myself, both here as a small example of paracriticism and in the original book review, because Rauch evokes the great models for speculative thinking about gender roles and about humanness that drive the paraliterature genres for me; while Webb herself as a botanist and as a contemporary of George Eliot evokes associations with Erasmus Darwin, who was one of the first to flirt with the idea that we can control gender, always a symbol for me since I wrote my dissertation on him of the quiet Enlightenment efforts (not really Faustian by our time) to manipulate everything. Thus for me this work of Webb as well as our critical readings of it represent our "paracritical" studies of the ways that art may, indeed, change nature. The paradox comes in, of course, when we remember Shakespeare's observation in The Winters Tale that "no art changes nature but nature made that art." And my hope is that such paradoxes as well as discussions of such texts as the Webb fiction will have new opportunities for expression in Para*doxa.

      Literature is, in Ezra Pound's phrase, "news that stays news." Paraliterature, while belonging to genres that are not themselves accepted as literature, can also stay news. And when it stays news, we can discuss it in Para*doxa. While our materials are different, they are certainly not inferior; any objective reader would agree, for instance, that H.G. Wells' scientific romances are still readable while his other fictions are not. So far so good. I think that where we get more confusion is when we mention that great shifting sandbar, the canon. How, for instance, did Edgar Allan Poe get in there? What did he write that wasn't Gothic, or fantasy, or the beginning of detective literature, or early science fiction? Obviously Poe should belong to paraliterature, and does. We just don't need to write about him in Para*doxa because he's covered so well in other journals. And several members of the editorial board observed that Frankenstein seems to have just become part of the canon. How did that happen? Feminism isn't enough of an answer (though enough to remind us that the canon shifts); I suspect it is because the SF community (especially David Ketterer) had been discussing Frankenstein so well for so long. So now we no longer need to. Conversely, several members of the editorial board listed writers who hadn't made it into the canon, and wondered why. I'll add another: Owen Wister, who, unlike Poe, was well connected, and whose century-old The Virginian, the prototype of the modern western, still has a loyal readership.

      I confess a disagreement with Ursula Le Guin: the canon does include a much wider range of materials than the realistic novel. Hawthorne laid claim to the romance as well as the novel in the mid-nineteenth century, and if that's too early an example, what about Franz Kafka? So maybe the obverse is better: paraliterature should include everything except the realistic novel. Anyway, I think it makes better strategic sense to subvert the realistic novel than to attack it. That is what Vladimir Nabokov does when he claims that "great novels are great fairy tales" and includes among these fairy tales Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Ulysses (as to Le Guin's odd notion that Joyce "really had very little influence on anybody," what about John Dos Passos, Malcolm Lowry, Anthony Burgess, and Ralph Ellison?). At any rate, I certainly haven't felt uncomfortable including The Left Hand of Darkness along with Lolita and Invisible Man in a course on modern American fiction.

      The canon is, after all, merely a highly debatable list of those works that all well-educated people should have read, partially to polish off their sensibility and humanity but also so that they can recognize each other by their common backgrounds. Yet, as Le Guin reminds us, people who read heavily in a particular genre can have an even stronger sense of community. Moreover, the canon used to include a great amount of classical literature and the Bible; now it seems to have shrunken considerably at one end while expanding at the other. There is always an abundance of both literature and paraliterature that isn't in the canon.

      I've noticed that while the editorial board is certainly paraliterary, we seem rather heavily leaning to the SF side of things. I assume we can all use that as a base to move around in other genres with each other's help; for instance, Samuel Delany can guide us through graphic novels, not to mention the scripting of ordinary comic-books (and not all comic books are ordinary either; like Robert Ellrich, I probably learned more about plot, timing, and characterization from Carl Barks' Uncle Scrooge than from any other source). The most interesting question, posed by several board members in different ways, is whether paraliterature should be judged by literary standards or by standards specific to each different genre. I don't know the answer, although occasionally I have written articles that nibbled at the periphery of the question. I suspect that, even though Delany has demonstrated that reader response is different for genre fiction (specifically SF, of course), the real answer lies rather in the author's intent, or rather, the author's imagined audience.

      What kinds of materials can Para*doxa cover? I hope it includes some surprises. Many years ago, Le Guin identified Dick's The Man in the High Castle and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings as seminal influences; but she also mentioned Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia, a delightful book, set in a fictional country in the southern hemisphere, that doesn't fit any genre any better than Tolkien's epic does. I don't need to read an article about that particular item, but I hope works that can't be obviously pigeonholed in a particular genre can also get a hearing in Para*doxa.

      A few of my concerns, in no particular order:

      1) Science fiction's history is rapidly being lost, as increasing numbers of books go out of print, rarely or never to be reprinted. (The same thing is true of most serious historical fiction, and may be true of other paraliteratures.) At least three programs designed to bring classic works of science fiction back into print have been cancelled during the past decade; since such programs generally make modest profits, publishers looking for much larger profits have little incentive to back them. It's not uncommon to encounter academics interested in sf, or even new writers and editors, who have never heard of many of the important works and authors in the genre, much less read them. This has a number of unfortunate consequences. Academics can misread science fiction, sometimes missing the point altogether, if the only writers they know are the few who have made it into sf's version of a canon. As Joanna Russ puts it:

one can't get minority work into the canon by pretending it's about the same things or uses the same techniques as majority work. It probably isn't and doesn't. It may very well look like nothing ever before seen on earth. When science fiction first entered academia, the mistakes made about it by critics were grotesque [...] This was due not only to a lack of scientific background - for example, some critics saw classic alien-background stories as nightmares, being unaware of the accuracy of the background and the delight in this as the story's point - but also to a lack of any knowledge of the field's history and conventions (including lack of the knowledge that it had a history and conventions). (Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983, p. 130)

      Writers suffer as well. Robert Silverberg recently wrote:

When young writers no longer have access to a broad historical overview of science fiction - when they are unable to absorb and digest and transmute, as we did, such books as Heinlein's Beyond this Horizon and van Vogt's The World of Null-A and Sturgeon's More Than Human and Bester's The Demolished Man, then a whole world of creative possibilities is lost to them: either they merely strive to replicate the simple, badly written books that they think of as the best of sf, or else they expend their creative energies reinventing wheels that were better designed by the writers of a generation ago. (Robert Silverberg, "Reflections: Gresham's Law Continued" in Asimov's Science Fiction, vol. 19, no. 3, Whole Number 228, March, 1995, p. 6)

      2) To discuss any literature, especially ones as rooted in popular culture as science fiction and other paraliteratures, without taking market forces and the general cultural climate into consideration, is a mistake. An article such as Duane Wilkins's "Shelving Wars or the Politics of 'Genrefication'," in the first issue of Para*doxa, tells us more about what is driving science fiction now than any number of purely literary analyses.

      3) Science fiction, historical fiction, and other varieties of fiction are ideally suited to being taught in the context of other disciplines - physics, astronomy, history, sociology, anthropology, to name only a few. A friend of mine, a professor of history whose speciality is modern European history, uses science fiction in some of his courses. I know of at least a couple of cases in which professors of physics made use of certain science fiction in their classes. Back in my school days, a history teacher of mine actually encouraged her students to dip into historical novels to gain some feeling for the past. When I was teaching introductory philosophy courses, works by Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, and others turned out to be ideal for illuminating various philosophical issues.

      But such efforts at cross-fertilization are often discouraged, ignored, or treated with contempt by literature departments. It is as though they feel that science fiction, if it is literature, should then be taught only with the full apparatus of literary theory and apart from other fields of study - or that, if it isn't "real" literature, then it shouldn't be taught at all.

      4) The fragmentation of science fiction into cyberpunk, new humanism, romantic sagas, military technothrillers, magic realism, postmodernism, and other approaches mirrors what in a broader literary context has been called the "Balkanization of literature." The proliferation of subgenres means that authors allegedly working in the same genre often have little or almost nothing in common as writers. How much sense does it make to talk of "science fiction" in such a context?

      5) The written word has less and less influence. In addition, more and more of our written works are derived from visual media, are spin-offs from earlier work, or are based on popular movies and TV series. Some might say that this is a change we'll have to live with, and that science fiction will still go on in other forms - comics, gaming, movies, virtual reality entertainments, or whatever.

      What worries me is that most of these popular forms - or alternatives to reading - rely heavily on what has been written, whether or not their creators acknowledge that fact. The written word is the wellspring of these other forms. The ideas in a movie such as Star Wars or a TV show such as Star Trek grew out of hundreds of written sf books and stories; you can almost trace their lineages as you watch. Without a large and diverse body of original work - written work - to nourish them, these forms are likely to become ever more derivative and shallow. Anyone doubting this has only to spend some time viewing the vast number of American movies made by people who have little or no acquaintance with or respect for the written word.

      6) In "Conversation with Ursula K. Le Guin", Ms. Le Guin mentions an experience that is, alas, all too common. She says:

If an artist is alive and you're writing something about him or her, it just seems a very strange discourtesy not to let them know. [Š] There's a presumption in academe that an artist is 'material' rather than a person. It's an objectification of a living being. (Para*doxa, vol. 1, no. 1, 1995, p. 50)

      I've had academics who have written about my work take the trouble to contact me, making it possible for me to clear up some factual errors. I've also had the experience of seeing someone publish a piece about my work without bothering to write to me, and getting some points seriously wrong. I would have let this pass (almost always the wisest course), but the piece contained factual mistakes that had to be corrected; I responded to the piece forcefully. Some months later, a friend of mine encountered this scholar at a conference and mentioned that he knew me, at which point the scholar exclaimed, "That's the last time I ever write about a living author!" Failing at vivisection, this man now prefers dissection, rather than taking advantage of the opportunity to go directly to a living source. It's my hope that some of these concerns - the loss of the history of various genres, the effects of the market and society on what is being published, the connections various genres have to other fields of study, the proliferation of subgenres and what that may mean to the integrity of certain genres, the twilight of the written word and what it may mean to our culture, and the need to encourage discussion between writers and researchers - will be addressed in future issues of Para*doxa.

      para-: beside, next to, deviating from.

      doxa: belief, opinion, received teaching.

      In Lucretius the atoms fall in a straight line until the first moment of incipient turbulence, which physics names in several ways, among them: clinamen.

      This deviation of a solitary atom from the undisturbed flow of innumerable other atoms, this singularity in "para-flow", creates or marks a nascent organization of multiplicity: a pattern of deviation. Discontinuity, then, marks nothing so much as the institution of another continuity.

      Social theory and the human sciences have grappled with such metaphors in efforts to describe the unpredictable relations between individuals and groups, between the knower and the known. These disciplines struggle methodologically to articulate the consequences - political, economic, psychological - of such movements, such "para-flows" and turbulences of difference and identity. With a self-reflexive shock as sudden as it is total, the analyst feels the very ground of observation swept away in clinamen, in the differentiation of epistemological particles. Paradoxically, Heisenberg's uncertainty becomes a principle.

      Literature, which Paul de Man described as an activity always and simultaneously falling both toward and away from reality, has elaborated this movement throughout its history. The advent of the Logos itself - whether in myth, in Heraclitus, Aristotle or John - may constitute the first "literary" moment. Whether or not one agrees with the statement, of course, depends as much on one's relation to (or refusal of) the Logos as it does on the parables in Heraclitus, Aristotle or John. Perhaps more so. This deviation, then, occurs indefinitely: multiple apparitions of the singular.

      The paradox of these innumerable paradoxes, then, is a gathering, an organization, a whirlpool within a parable: the literary form that tells one thing by telling another.

      For this reason, the practice of literature traces a parable of theory, retelling its articulation, its elaboration, its iteration by telling, in fact, something else.

      Theory, on the other hand, might be called the paradox of practice: a clinamen detected in a space of difference between the falling atoms and the Logos of divine, rational or logical principle. Epistemologist Donald Davidson, in Paradoxes of Irrationality, swerves into a fundamental paradox as if for the very first time: irrationality, he states, can be found only in rational beings.

      Kafka traces the shape of such deviations, and the turbulence they imply, in a parable titled "On Parables": "all these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter."

      "Why such reluctance?" one speaker asks. "If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares."

      Then another says: "I bet that is also a parable."

      The first speaker replies: "You win."

      The second says: "But unfortunately only in parable."

      The first says: "No, in reality: in parable you have lost."

      Paradoxically, no one does not already know this parable. No one knows, however, that everyone already knows it. But this is true, Kafka states, only in reality. In parable it is false.

      Paraliterature, then, writes clinamen, inscribes the moment of nascent turbulence within a given orthodoxa: Ortho, right or correct; doxa, belief, opinion or received teaching.

      Para*doxa seems a particularly appropriate title for a journal dealing with popular and genre literatures, since the academic study of such literatures has historically been plagued by a central paradox: the desire to present such literatures as worthy of serious interrogation, while at the same time hedging the bet by finding labels that clearly seem to separate them from more elitist modes of cultural expression. In the 1950s, Reuel Denney and other pioneers wrote of the proletarian-sounding "mass culture", which eventually gave way to "popular culture"; both terms carried a faint hint of slumming, and implied that there was another, "high" culture, the investigation of which needed no such protective rubric. Such distinctions are far from being erased; only a couple of years ago, the Art Institute of Chicago mounted an exhibition exploring the relations of popular culture to modern art, giving it the uncompromising title "High and Low".

      In Europe, such terms as paralittérature and Trivialliteratur have also helped to reinforce this implied gulf between texts of implicit value and texts studied primarily because of their manner of distribution, their audience, or their relations with similar texts. Again, these terms carry the suggestion that there is something called "literature" (or "culture" in a broader sense) and something else that lurks at the fringes, perhaps gobbling up income that ought to be spent on more serious enterprises, perhaps constituting a kind of crypto-etiology of cultural malaise, perhaps disguising hidden masterpieces that ought to be mined and put safely on display in the canonical museum of high culture. We can see the latter sort of mining going on all the time: Philip K. Dick is magically transformed from a popular science fiction writer making his living in the paperbacks into a postmodern icon; Art Spiegelman is extracted from the despised world of comics and awarded a special Pulitzer Prize because his Maus II didn't fit into accepted categories. Yet, as a whole, science fiction and comics remain consigned to the realms of paralittérature, Trivialliteratur, pop lit, mass culture, or what have you.

      By its very nature, academia - the culturally-assigned source of most literary scholarship - is invested in the notion of canons. Only a limited number of texts can make it into curricula - and a much smaller number of contemporary or recent texts. The postmodern breakdown of received categories and values, I think, has resulted in a kind of academic and critical paralysis when it comes to dealing with the aesthetics of new and/or popular art forms. We can deal with Ursula Le Guin - whose work yields nicely to traditional forms of exegesis - but not with A.E. Van Vogt, whose work is an unholy mess by almost any traditional standards - but which retains a strange power for its readers. We can build a whole critical industry around Thomas Pynchon, but we are dismayed - as many academic critics were - when his Vineland abounds in knowing references to "Gilligan's Island" and "Hawaii Five-O". Unable to arrive at a consensus aesthetic for those aspects of culture of which we remain suspicious, we try to kidnap sociology and force it to do day labor in the fields of literary criticism.

      My hope is that Para*doxa can become a forum for new approaches and open discussions of culture at the margins, that it can explore ways of approaching such culture on its own terms, and that it can contribute toward relieving the paralysis I mentioned above. I do not mean to suggest that sociological, psychoanalytic, political, or economic approaches are not valuable - quite the contrary - but only that the texts themselves are also worthy of attention as something more than symptoms. We cannot continue to credibly argue that the boundaries implied by terms such as paralittérature are still as clear as we once may have believed, and the best hope of a journal such as this is that it can begin to explore those shifting, dissolving boundaries without preconceptions and without intolerance.